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My Rights, My Voice

At a glance

My Rights, My Voice engages marginalised children and youth as active citizens and supports them as they claim their rights to health and education services.

Overview

My Rights, My Voice (MRMV) aims to empower marginalized children and youth to know and claim their rights to health and education services. This innovative four-year programme is running in Afghanistan, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan and Vietnam - it also ran in Georgia and Tanzania during its first three years. MRMV is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

The belief behind the MRMV initiative is that children and youth have a right to free, good quality health and education services. They also have a right to voice their needs, to hold their governments to account, and to be listened to as members of society and rights-holders: as 'active citizens'.

MRMV works with partners and directly with children and youth, their allies, and duty-bearers to strengthen and support young people's voices and ability to claim their rights.

Objectives

Almost half the world's population are under the age of 25 and 85 per cent of those live in developing countries. Despite this, young people, especially girls and young women, are rarely involved in making decisions that affect their lives and do not always have the relevant information about their choices or rights. My Rights, My Voice aims to address this.

MRMV's four key objectives:

• To increase children and youth's awareness of their rights to health and education services.
• To strengthen children and youth's and their allies' skills and capacity to claim these rights.
• To facilitate opportunities for children and youth to engage with duty bearers (e.g. health and education ministries, teaching and medical professionals, religious leaders) which lead to specific actions delivering better access to and quality of health and education services.
• To strengthen Oxfam and our partners' capacity to work on youth agency and support our global campaigning force to facilitate youth claiming and accessing better health and education.

My Rights, My Voice Global Advocacy Workshop comic strip In December 2013, My Rights, My Voice held a Global Advocacy Workshop in Nairobi for youth partners. This comic strip story shows how 16 MRMV youth campaigners came together with Oxfam and partner staff to network, share and strengthen their skills around advocating for child and youth rights to health and education services.